High School Art

Okay! My scanner arrived, so it's now time to start posting some drawrings. I decided to start from way back... as in Freshman-Senior in highschool work. That means some of these are nearly 15 years old! Just a handful of pictures. Some (if not all) of the illustrations have major problems of course, but I wanted to post them anyway. And seeing as the paper they're on is starting to fall apart, I thought I'd digitize them for preservation. Looking back at these, I can see a glimmer of potential, but I went into graphic design instead of illustration, so now it's merely a hobby for me and one that I sadly neglected for awhile.

Let's get started. (click for larger)

Just a doodle.

Kind of a self portrait, with a propeller beanie for some reason.

Another self portrait.

Another. No, wait, this was just a doodle in math class. My friend Dave and I each drew pirates during class (his was better). As an experiment, he left his in the basket below his seat just to send it on a journey. A few weeks later, he happened to see it in some guy's folder with that guy's signature on it!

An original character of mine. All sorts of problems with the arms and hands, but in my defense I was only 16 or 17 and didn't understand construction all that well... maybe I still don't, but at least now I can tell when it looks wrong.

Funny(?) story about this one for my history class. It actually caused some controversy in my school. The intent of it was to use an old aryan iconic image and skew the perception a little to cast a negative light on it... hence the snake that represents the good in this country being crushed by the prodigal son who represents the bad. Well, an african worker at the school apparently missed the message and thought it was a pro-racist, pro-evil statement. He got really offended and if I remember correctly, they took the picture down from the little mini show it was in. Hey, nobody said censorship had to be smart.

This one also caused some controversy at school. People were up in arms wondering why this poorly drawn version of shaggy had no feet!

This one was a winning entry in a mural contest. I got to paint it on a large wall inside a youth center, where it still remains to this day. I think the gray wall was changed to brick red or bricks. Someone told me these characters seemed like two different sides of my personality. Note the shoes on the James Dean type character... recycled from my earlier 50's guy.

Look out! It's a giant buck-tooth baby! This one comes from a boring english class I think.

My, my, what a wacky mad scientist.

Winning front logo for our Senior keg t-shirt. I still have one of the shirts, and for the back I drew a large jungle keg-god surrounded by worshippers... but I don't think it's really worth digging up and taking a photo of. We'll see.

This was supposed to be an angry, asianesque sun. When I told someone it was supposed to be that, they said, "no, it's not asian looking." Upon further investigation it also seems more cranky than angry... so I guess it's a slightly miffed, pseudo-asian-wannabee sun.

This one was inspired by the movie Backdraft. If you click the image for larger, you can probably see an insane amount of cross-hatching there. Quite tedious. Some way into this one, I realized how messed up the proportions were on the shoulders (right is way off!), so I lost motivation to finish.

There you have it! A painful trip down highschool memory lane. I have many more pics, but the others I weeded out for one reason or another... if I can find a pic of that final mural and one of a big satan I made I'll post them. Also, I might try to track down two large 2nd place pieces from bigger competitions.

Up next... college!